One reason I'm leaning hard towards "someone here is trying to scam people" is the amount of money involved. $250,000 is the biggest number they're quoted as needing. If one spends five minutes researching how much it actually costs to make a AAA rpg, one learns that that number is laughably tiny.

Then there's the fact that the game has basically no design documentation, just a few brainstormed ideas. There's no there there. And when anyone criticizes them, the developers go ballistic. It sets off a ton of alarm bells.

And also! Con artists usually succeed by appealing to peoples' sense of goodness. "We're doing good, so it's okay that xyz". That's going on here like woah.